What's the worst thing your boss has ever made you do?

I think he finally gave up on me. Thank God.

 

I'd love to know specific on this one...

I've worked for bosses who have "allowed" a writer to cover an event they really want to in exchange for something like giving up comp time to cover something else, or rescheduling a vacation. I've always thought that was pretty bad, but if people are stupid enough to agree to it, then it's on them...

 

I was asked to switch to the news department once.

 

Hopefully, he's given up on me, too. I guess I'm not a looser bootstrapper.

 

At my first full-time stop, we ran a section of business profiles -- reporters (including sports) wrote them up, the businesses profiled got right of last edit. Perhaps this is fairly common at small-town papers; at the time, my only newspaper experience was as a PTer at a 200,000-circ. daily, and I knew they didn't do that. So I was aghast, but you do what you gotta do.

I did a complete blow job of a story on one of the businesses, so completely over the top that it bordered on parody, but shit, I have no experience in copywriting. VP of the company calls to make line-by-line changes, fucking around with everything EXCEPT the over-the-top parts like "exciting family fun" and "greatest bargain in entertainment." He also changed people's quotes to better conform to whatever vision he had. And he made these changes an hour before presstime -- a deadline NOBODY told me about until they called me from lunch and told me to hurry back.

Was offered a job interview somewhere else that day, thought it was karma, but I ended up staying there another year or so before finally getting out.

 

Must mean he's finally found his bootstrapper. I wonder who the poor sap is ...

 

Years back, working news side for a local paper, our publisher dispatched me to this meeting of a local business association (he was a member) dedicated to revitalizing the town's stagnating downtown district.

One of our senators was at this meeting, so essentially the purpose was to hit him up for funds to breathe life into downtown Frottageville.

This was all very innocuous, except the date was something like September 21, 2001. So after listening to the pitch, the senator basically politely explained that in the wake of a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil there wasn't much money in the kitty to dress up a small town's business district.

That, of course, is what I wrote.

So the next day, the publisher calls me into his office and proceeds to shoot liquid fire up my ass.

"Kaylee," he said, "that's not the story I was looking for. I wanted a story on how the Business Association for Downtown Frottageville showed a united front."

"That's not what happened," I said.

"But you could have written about the senator listened to what we had to say and was interested."

"That's not what happened."

"The people in the community need to know how hard we're working to fix downtown."

"That's not what happened."

Thus began and ended my brief career as a business writer.

 

BADF has good meeting

By Kaylee

The Business Association for Downtown Frottageville met yesterday at the Frottageville Chamber of Commerce ... and a good time was had by all?


Something like that is what he wanted?

;D

 

Two things:

1: A rag I worked at for a precious little while had a "system" where staff writers were assigned to write "profiles" on local businessess that were paid ads. That was bad enough. Worse was the fact that you had to take the story and go back to the subject and let him/her edit it. I was one-and-done.

2: My sports editor (at a reasonably large paper) knew I was interviewing a guy from his favorite team and asked me to get the guy's autograph. I refused. He let me have it in front of the staff.

Sigh.

 

become our de facto webmaster because our IT guy was a useless piece of shit. this was during a time when we were completely revamping our website, so i became pretty much in charge of that operation.

i was the night news editor. my web experience = designing my own personal website, and that's it. oh, and our IT guy was never fired or reassigned or anything, just allowed to keep doodling around. the spell that idiot would put on the up-and-ups never ceased to amaze.

i was in the process of finding another job, and that just helped light a bigger fire under my ass.

 

I had three in my first job, with a podunk weekly.

1.) I got sent out to take a photo at a bridal tea. 15 minutes, tops, the publisher says. Of course, it's a family friend of his. so I go. I'm there 45 minutes because the host is hassling with something in the kitchen, all the while basically ignoring me. I'm swimming in the estrogen river and finally manage to round the group up for this picture. Everyone's arranged except the host, and when she finally gets there she starts asking questions. I don't remember what they were, but I'd finally had enought and told her, "just shut up and smile." She did. I clicked. I left.

2.) Same publisher comes to me one day and says, we've sold ads to the new bowling alley in exchange for a story. There is no other business in town that gets as much space gratis as this bowling alley; my whole life was typing bowling agate. I was telling this to a coworker years later and she said, "Jeez, just tell him to put a red light over your desk."

3.) I'm assigned to go out and take pictures during a joint task force drug raid. Normally, all the news photos were taken by the one staff reporter, who was a female and a much better photographer than me. She was told it was because I was accustomed to taking action photos. Never mind that I spent half of every week worrying about whether I had one usuable picture out of the four or five rolls I'd shot. Utter bullshit. Thankfully, she didn't hold it against me. Then, I get out on the drug raid -- I'm riding with the police chief. We get to the raid site, and as soon as the door is open on the car I hear a gun shot and hit the ground. I got nothing on film. The shot? Some officer dropped his gun and it went off.